Research

Papers Under Review:

  • Frictional Unemployment and Trade in Value Added

I quantify the welfare and employment effect of international trade both at the aggregate and sector level. The model combines both labour market imperfections and input-output linkages (which takes the form of tradable intermediate inputs in the production function). I build into a multi-country, multi-sector Ricardian model (Eaton and Kortum, 2002) the imperfect labour market with the search and matching framework (Pissarides, 2000). Welfare and equilibrium unemployment are both associated with production and labour market efficiency. Comparing with the trade gains literature, trade gains generated in our model is magnified by the inverse of labour market matching elasticity. The change in sectoral employment rate relative to the trade policy change can be decomposed into two parts: the change in the share of domestic expenditure in that sector and the change in sectoral price index via the sectoral linkages. The counterfactual analysis of “The China Syndrome” after China joining the WTO in 2001 provides evidence that there is heterogeneous effect of one country's trade liberalization on other country's welfare and labour market outcomes across sectors.


We estimate the role of foreign or product market competition through drop in output tariffs following the Indian trade liberalization process in the 1990s on the business investment (financial) responses of the Indian manufacturing firms. We find that higher degree of product market competition, or a 10% drop in output tariffs reduces business investments of a firm by around 2.5%. Our results show substantial heterogeneity when dividing firms by their ownership: family-owned and others. The response of the former is in stark contrast to the latter: family firms either drop their investments 50-98% less or increase it by 0.2-1.5% when compared to non-family firms. And affiliation to an upstream and/or R&D intensive industry plays a critical role in explaining such differential behaviour. Lastly, we show that business investment active family firms in fact experience a rise in their output and sales. Our results highlight one important point, both from theoretical and empirical perspective, how a firm's ownership influences its business decisions while firms compete with external forces.

Working Papers:

  • Cross-border M&A and the Performance of Acquirer: In the Presence of the Origin Effect and Heterogeneous Treatment [pdf]

(This paper win the "2019 46th AIB UKI Conference Best Paper Award: The Research in International Business and Finance Prize" )

This paper analyze the causal effect of cross-border M&A on the productivity performance of acquiring firms, recognizing the country origin groups of the investing firms and varying features of the acquisition. It estimate how deal features and target firms pre-deal performance would alter the effect of Cross-border M&A. We compile a unique multiple countries data set for the analysis using M&A data from UNCTAD cross-border M&A database and company data from OSIRIS and firm annual reports. The result indicates that acquiring firms would achieve an increase of around 1.4% of the productivity growth rate one year after the acquisition. The estimated effect are larger for acquirers form developing country than these from industrialized economies and also differs in deal features and target firm performance.

Research Project(s):

  • Evaluation of Derbyshire Festival of Business (with Professor Qile He and Dr Weiwei Yang)

  • Research Assistant for Professor Martin Spring (Lancaster University) and Professor Alan Hughes (Imperial College Business School & University of Cambridge Judge Business School) for the project: Performance Measurement, Productivity and Management Practices in Small Firms. (2019/01-2021/01)